PCI Intel AX210 wifi adapter not always recognized

[raedeus]

A strange issue I have encountered with a Gigabyte PCI wifi card using the Intel AX210 chipset is that sometimes when I boot up it randomly works and other (most) times it does not.

The hardware always shows up via lspci. If I run iwconfig it is not listed when I'm encountering the issue.

Strange thing to note is that IF I plug an ethernet cable into the onboard motherboard NIC it begins to work (wifi adapter that is) even after disconnecting ethernet.

Kernel version is 6.8.0-57-generic

Any advice to troubleshoot is greatly appreciated.

-raedeus

[claydoh]

Try disabling any network auto-switching in your BIOS, if available. Worth a try.
Are you dual-booting Windows? If so, disable the Fast Startup feature in that OS. This sort-of-hibernate state can do funky things with some hardware, particularly ones that have firmware.


I have an ax210 as well, but no issues here. Mine is connected though the m.2 slot as opposed to a PCI slot, though most PCI wifi cards are just adapters that hold an m.2 device, so that aspect probably is not an issue (m.2 uses the PCI bus).

[raedeus]

I appreciate the suggestions claydoh and I do not dual boot just straight from an SSD. I was looking into the BIOS but couldn't find much to remedy the situation. Worst case I'll pickup a card with a different chipset perhaps but I certainly would like to figure out the issue.

Checking the manufacturer websites and it seems the kernel has support for this particular chipset as well. I should note that I have ran other distros on this hardware and never had an issue.

[claydoh]

I have had mine for a little while now. I am on the current HWE kernel 6.11, but it ran fine when I had the original 6.8. I think, This is a replacement card, I just can't recall when I added it.

Ok, it was January, so much more recent than I thought, but still before Ubuntu updated to the 6.11 kernel in February. I have booted to the 6.8 kernel with no issue on my aging i5-7500 HP Elitedesk mini. as far as I can see For your installs that had no issue, which kernels did they have? If newer than 6.8. it may be worth enabling the HWE stack to get the more current kernel etc that more current 24.04 installations get.

sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-24.04

I can't think of what else to look at off the top of my head.

If you do decide to try a different card, do make sure it is an Intel chip, or heavily research what other chip is uses, Realtek has a crap ton of chips and some do work ootb, but most at the very least may require manually installing a third party driver pulled from GitHub (not really difficult) but even then they often have chip revisions that may not work well or at all with a particular driver code. It can be a bit of a mess with the "wrong' card.

Intel ax200 and 201 have been good for me. Brostrend sell Linux supported Realtek items, and at least since kernel 6.8, I haven't needed to use their driver repo for anything (before 24.04/kernel 6.8, it worked, but was quite slow and disconnected often on the built-in driver)

[raedeus]

I appreciate the recommendations and will give this a try. I booted up today and of course I continue to have the same problem. It worked over the weekend oddly enough.

[raedeus]

As a test I disabled the onboard NIC in the BIOS and have shutdown and booted up 5 times with no issues. Perhaps this will be a fix for now. We'll see if it holds up.